But I have a feeling there will be surprises – that things will change more over the next year or two than some might expect. Here’s a personal look at what might change, what needs to change, and what will trundle on much the same.

GDS for the last five years has been seen as Whitehall’s digital department, when its real purpose has been to create strategy and demonstrate and drive change more widely. I would expect that purpose to become clearer in the coming years. What will that mean in practice? Here are a few guesses:

Support and development of the Gov.uk website will be sold off or mutualised. This will follow a model similar to the Crown Hosting Service and the Shared Services Centre, where Ark Data Centres and Steria respectively run operations as a joint venture, part-owned by government. There’s no longer a strategic need for Gov.uk to be run entirely in-house – the technology infrastructure and publishing platform are in place, and content management is devolved to departments. It’s becoming a commodity service and is likely to be commercialised as such.

Developing digital transactions will be the responsibility of departments, driven from the centre by Civil Service CEO John Manzoni. It’s often forgotten that Manzoni, appointed in October 2014, is the person ultimately responsible and accountable for digital transformation across Whitehall – not GDS chief Mike Bracken.

He’s had six months to assimilate his new job, and to assess the needs for civil service reform and greater efficiency. It’s significant that Matt Hancock has not taken on the entire job previously held by Francis Maude – we effectively have two Cabinet Office ministers in Hancock and Oliver Letwin. The latter is more senior, but Hancock has been given a focus on “efficiency and civil service reform” – the new political muscle behind Manzoni’s plans.

GDS has already announced that its initial transformation programme is over – the 25 digital “exemplar” transactions that were the focus of the first wave of digital development and were mostly, to some degree, implemented before the election. Responsibility for those exemplars and further transactions has been gradually handed back to the departments as their own digital teams have expanded. You can expect to see GDS being much less involved in the day-to-day delivery of digital transactions from now on.

In general, as digital services move from strategy to delivery to ongoing support, this three-tier model of GDS (strategy), departments (delivery) and private sector / joint ventures (support) will become clear.

Remember that the GDS recruitment pitch to bring digital experts out of the private sector and into the civil service has always been to say: “Come and work for us for two or three years and help us change government”. Outside of a permanent core team, the idea was always to flex in size and skills according to the next transformation task ahead. Some of those core team members will go during the next five-year parliamentary cycle – CTO Liam Maxwell, for example, is contracted until 2018 and if he feels he has completed the overhaul of technology delivery and contracting he set out to achieve, he’s likely to move on.

Francis Maude promised that all the big outsourcing deals inherited in 2010 from the previous Labour government would have gone by 2020. Most of them conclude in the next two or three years. GaaP is not going to be developed enough – or a panacea – to replace them all in that time. The process of contract disaggregation will continue; some incumbent suppliers will gain short-term extensions; some will win a few of the disaggregated contracts; you can almost guarantee that some of the transitions will go badly. But, largely, Maude’s promise will be fulfilled.

The biggest outsourcing deal of them all, HM Revenue & Customs’ £800m a year Aspire contract, expects to save £200m or 25% of that annual cost through disaggregation. That’s still £600m a year of external supplier spend – and will half or even a quarter of that go to directly contracted SMEs? No way. Once the big contracts are replaced, it’s going to be almost impossible to say that even 25% of new IT spend has gone to SMEs without some very creative accounting on behalf of the big suppliers claiming much greater use of small businesses in their supply chain.

The aspiration to make greater use of SMEs will continue – and many SMEs will benefit – but the target numbers will be difficult to prove. There is still plenty of money to be made for the big outsourcers from the new government.

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I fear you are likely to be disappointed. The only surprise is likely to be the lack of surprises. The big contracts are unlikely to be replaced by big contracts. There is far more likely to be an incremental trend towards 'rightsourcing' bringing the control of strategic planning, procurement and 'architecture' back in house, under user-control, with inter-operable components from competing suppliers. The measure of success will be that of Richard Holway: the 'boring' delivery of value for money and quality of service.